Well that one was a surprise wasn’t it! Mis-speaking seems to be the in thing these days.

But seriously Whoopie, or should I say Caryn Elaine Johnson, really should have stopped to think. Here she is, a black woman who has “appropriated” a Jewish surname appearing to say that Nazis weren’t racist. Oh boy what a can of worms. But wait a moment.

When she suggested that if she were standing on the sidewalk with a Jew and the Klu Klux Klan marched down the street, she would be the one running, not the Jew, because he’s white, was she revealing something? She clearly knows “Jews” but most likely thinks of them mainly as white Americans.

What she has revealed is that there is a serious difference in people’s thinking between racial prejudice and colour prejudice. I hadn’t really spotted that before. The darker you are, the more prejudice is likely from white people. So it’s colour. A white South African is indeed an African, but we wouldn’t refer to them as “Euro-Africans”, like “Afro-Americans”, nor do we refer to to people of African heritage living in Europe as “Afro-Europeans” (do we?). Words are powerful and interesting and confusing at times.

What Caryn missed so obviously is that it is the Jewish RACE that Hitler wanted to eliminate.

It is the Jewish RACE that Hitler wanted to exterminate. That is racism in the raw. GENOCIDE. It is confused by the fact that Jews and Judaism* get conflated, just like Arabs and Islam or indeed Europeans/Americans and Christianity. When people speak negatively against Islam they are usually dubbed “Racist“, which of course they aren’t. That is the wrong word. But “Religionist” sounds ridiculous.

So perhaps its time to go back to using the term “Colour” instead of “Racial” Prejudice.

*Many Jews are atheists, not believers in Judaism, so they are Jewish, but not Jewish!

Then the issue of nationality as opposed to race. There are Arab Israelis as well as other racial groups, so you can have Christian Israelis and Moslem Israelis.